A bit of background: when I was working textiles, I regularly engaged in a “discussion” with quilters (some traditional, some contemporary) about whether the stitching work done on my textiles ( specifically in construction and quilting) should strive for perfection. I always maintained that my goal was “competence.” My attention was entirely on the image and impact (on, I maintained, the art).  The craft was there only to hold it together and/or to add to the art. Hence my seams were not necessarily straight and the back of the art was decent but not flawless (I didn’t bury my threads, for example, simply tidied them). I used the quilting stitches as part of the design, which meant that they were generally not even in length and that they were heavy in places and light in others; this can make the quilted art hang wonkily, requiring heroic measures to make it perform well.

This is an example of a old piece of mine that I claim has “competent” craft:

Sophie, Emerging, 84 x 73″, 2002, Materials: hand-painted cotton, canvas, silk, stretch-polyester, felt. Methods: hand- painted-and-dyed, airbrushed and commercial fabrics. Machine stitched.

Sophie Emerging, Detail

I violated all kinds of quilting craft standards here — you can probably see that the center has been lightly stitched while around it the stitching is quite heavy. I mixed materials so wildly that my friends burst into laughter when they heard that I hoped the canvas, silk, light-weight cotton, and stretch fabrics  would hang flat on exhibit. I did exhibit it, with aluminum rods inserted top and bottom, one of which got lost so the piece buckled badly (the uneven stitching, not to mention the range of fabrics, will do that).   At one point I almost took it out of an exhibit because it showed up so badly next to the much finer craft that it hung beside. We replaced the rod, which helped a little, although it always did look like sloppy craft (albeit not “sloppy craft.”)

I didn’t reform much in the following years, although I did throw away the stretch fabrics in my collection. But I continued to have discussions about how “fine”  the craft which gets put into art should be — how much it should conform to finely crafted quilts, for example, that regularly win large awards at national quilt shows. Is competence sufficient in quilted/stitched textile art?

Which brings me to the panel discussion “Sloppy Craft”. “Sloppy craft” is described by craft theorist Glenn Adamson as the “unkempt” product of a “post-disciplinary craft education.” The panel here in Portland featured The Art Institute of Chicago’s  Professor Anne Wilson (Fibers and Materiality), Wilson’s former student Josh Faught (now teaching Fibers at the University of Oregon), Nan Curtis (professor and head of many departments at the Pacific Northwest College of Art), local artist Jessica Jackson Hutchins, and Namita Gupta Wiggers, the head curator of the Contemporary Crafts Museum. The discussion was held in the Commons at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, which in itself startled me — it seemed an unlikely venue for the old Contemporary Crafts Museum. While the CCM has recently moved downtown to the heart of Portland’s art scene and has had some staff shake-ups and financial troubles, they were traditionally a quiet force for High Craft in Portland. Whereas, the College of Art (PNCA) has a highly contemporary, conceptually-based, post-modern orientation.

All the panelists have had wide exposure in exhibits and reviews and writing about their respective areas and seem clear about their own artistic journeys.

Josh Faught, according to his instructor at Chicago Anne Wilson, knows his craft (fibers — weaving, crochet, knitting)  inside and out, and is currently working in sculptural mode:

Josh Faught, Untitled, 2008 crocheted hemp and garden trellis

Jessica Jackson Hutchins, the youngest panel member, also does sculptural work.

Jessica Jackson Hutchins Convivium, 2008, table, linen, paper maché and ceramic, 52.75 x 56.75 x 53.75 inches

Nan Curtis is an installation artist (she did 52 “street signs” along 12th Ave, two blocks away from my house, signs which were posted on telephone poles, like rock band flyers, but having official government looking typeface and material). She has installed complete versions of her home (“Homebody,” Manuel Izquierdo gallery, 1998), and many other conceptual installations of that sort.

Nan Curtis, Role Model #1: She has always served him well 2005
digital photograph on gator board 22.25″ x 29.75″

Anne Wilson too works in installation mode, although her imagery seems less rough to me:

Anne Wilson, Topologies*, 2002

Namita Wiggers continues to make her imprint on the Contemporary Crafts Museum (she oversaw its transition to its highly visible downtown location) and has become a force on the Portland Art Scene. She writes and interviews extensively, is a regular participant in the national crafts scene, and brings exhibits of the highest quality to the CCM.

So, what did this diverse group of artists, three who have roots in traditional fine crafts, have to say about craft and art.

Anne Wilson was perhaps the most interesting interlocutor: she said that “sloppy” was really a sound bite, irresistible once uttered aloud. “Sloppy” indicates intentionality, which she didn’t think was the case with the art she was describing. She would favor terms like “informal” “casual” or “raw” rather than “sloppy” to describe contemporary art that has some base in traditional crafts. Most interestingly, she observed that artists now seem to “take on” crafting only when they need it.

Traditionally, a craftsperson would spend years polishing her craft, working at the highest level until she was so good she could let it go; she would have behind her all the knowledge needed to return to “fineness” if the art required it. To some extent Josh Faught fits that mold. He self-identified as a Fibers Major at Chicago, while his fellow students in fibers always made clear they were “Fibers-and-…” “…and performance,” “…and installation,” “…and assemblage,” “…and collage.” But at some point Faught let go of the fine work of Fiber Craft and turned to rawer work.

Another example of the fine craftsperson turning to raw work after years of exquisitely fine craft is Peter Voulkos.

Peter Voulkos died in 2002 but a look at his biography shows a continuing movement through the highest worlds of craft, then into the fine art world. His craft won him honors over and over again. And his art gained him access to the most formidable museums of high art.

That model, learning the craft inside and out and then letting yourself go, however, has changed to “learning on need” which means that you might teach yourself how to sew a straight seam but can put off learning to sew curves (not to mention French seams).  And you might marry stretch/polyester to silk, which violates a lot of traditional sewing standards, for a number of reasons.

Beyond the Need to Know response of current students were a couple of other aspects of “sloppy craft.” One was the recycling of materials — trash art, one might call it. It’s everywhere these days, at least in Portland, and no one bats an eye at exhibits with “wedding dresses” made from plastic bags picked up on the streets. The other aspect of this kind of casual crafting is that it appears most often in assemblages and collage. Assemblages and collage have clear ancestors, dating back to Picasso, through Rauschenberg and arte povera and  are seen and made by thousands of people who may not even think of themselves as artists.

Two exhibits, Unmonumental at the New Museum in New York and From Trash to Spectacle: Materiality in Contemporary Art Production were specifically referenced as examples of what has happened in the national scene  when informal craft became firmly entrenched in the world of art. These kinds of works — ready-mades, gritty street junk, messy — are contrasted to the highly commercial and polished art of say, Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog or Takashi Murakami’s Vuitton bags, which are “finely crafted brands” (the phrase used by Kathryn Hixson at the School of the art Institute of Chicago in her discussion of Trash to Spectacle).

Anne Wilson made another comment at the panel discussion that stuck with me: she said that so-called sloppy art required the highest level of attention to detail — everything counted, because the meaning of the art is  so central. No lapses into mumbling or side-trips into irrelevant detail could be allowed to interfere with the meaning of the piece. Her example was of a student working with clay and fabric, who wanted to indicate the spilling out of fluid materials from the hardness of the clay. But the student closed the ends of her fabric spillages with stitching  and that attention to a “craft” detail stopped the sense of things spilling and in some sense stopped the art from succeeding.

One audience member at the panel noted that because we are now mostly knowledge workers, with few workers in the general public who craft anything besides digital artifacts, fine craft may be accessible only to aficionados of specific fine crafts. In my experience, people are piqued by color and image and like to see stitching, but really can’t see or don’t care if the stitches are tiny or big. They are aware only the overall  force of the wall-hung or sculptural material.

In fine craft, attention must be paid to every detail of the crafting — stitches must be buried into the interior of the quilt; wood grains must enhance the flow of the entire piece and be carved and sanded to perfection. That’s the “need” of fine craft, focusing attention on the material itself. But the “need” of contemporary fine art, according to Arthur Danto, philosopher of aesthetics, is to pay full and whole attention to the meaning of the work; every detail must express the meaning of the whole.

I would add another difference between high art and high craft which is that art tends to be individually identified: Anne Wilson is the artist, even though she may work with a large crew. But much of fine craft is community-identified: the Gees Bend quilts, the totems of the Pacific Northwest indigenous peoples; African masks. The craft may be formed by a single individual, but it arises from the standards of a community. Sometimes at the highest level, the two overlap, so we may know Bill Reid’s name as one who sculpts items such as were crafted by Pacific Northwest indigenous peoples. But much of finely crafted work is anonymous, perhaps done communally. And the standards by which it is judged are set by a community of craftpersons, those who know exactly how many stitches there are in that particular inch, just by looking at it.

As Kathryn Hixson comments, trashy and fine art and craft may represent continuums rather than opposites (so I’m in the running with my middling concept of “competent”.) I am fond of Bill Reid’s sculpture, finely crafted of course, which seems to exemplify in its imagery some of the difficulties this kind of discussion is always running in to:

Bill Reid, Raven and the First Men, 1980

Reid’s humans, working to escape the clam shell, may exemplify the struggle to understand as well as produce, and to produce out of understanding, that forms the most singular element of our current state of art.

As a kind of PS, I would venture to say that Jay’s work fits perfectly into the informal craft mode, while Hanneke’s seems to harken back to the traditional crafting of fine art. And I just heard about a class in figure drawing at a local university, which runs for 3 quarters. The first quarter features only the bones of the human figure; measuring and drawing bones is all that students do. The second quarter moves on to muscles (with more measuring); the third allows for some flesh — always measured. The mind boggles, but there are at least 15 students in the class who are opting for this model of traditional high art crafting.

And this just in: in today’s NY Times,  Denis Dutton,a professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and the author of “The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution.” takes on the whole question of permanency in crafting and art.

* And as a further PS, I thought it might be worthwhile to present some official textual presentation that accompanied Anne Wilson’s Topologies exhibit, as a sample of the kind of thinking brought forth by her work in “informal” crafting.

project statement from Anne Wilson’s Topologies

While our society faces a growing fragmentation and specialization that seems at times to alienate us all, we have also started to view our world as a series of integrated, even entangled networks. One way we can begin to understand this contradictory state is as a matrix of field phenomena – repetitive patterns of texture, growth, turbulence, sound, light, etc., within a given system or space.

– Douglas Garofalo, architect

Textiles, in their expandable and accumulative structure, can be seen as metaphors for such a matrix. In this new project, the webs and networks of found black lace are deconstructed to create large horizontal topographies, ‘physical drawings’ that are both complicated and delicate. This work is a constantly unfolding process of close observation, dissection, and recreation. The structural characteristics of lace are understood by unraveling threads; following the impetus to remake, mesh structures are also reconstructed through crochet and netting. The computer affords another means of close observation: lace fragments are scanned, filtered, and printed out as paper images. These computer-mediated digital prints are then re-materialized by hand stitching and are placed in relationship to the found and re-made lace in the topography.

The logic of organization within the project is based on the concept of like kinds. Never exactly repeating, areas of proximity are formed on the basis of the structural and visual characteristics of likeness. There is both unity and formlessness as parts coalesce, separate, and collide.

As a physical material, black lace has diverse cultural implications in relation to sexuality, death, and gender. These aspects of material context are embedded in the work, yet are not the dominant voice. This project references many things simultaneously: relationships between systems of materiality (textile networks) and systems of immateriality (Internet and the web); microscopic, specimen-like images of biology and the internal body; and macro views of urban sprawl – systems of organization of city structures, interdependent and/or parasitic, processes of expansion. No single theme or position is privileged over another.

This project is large in scale, but the specific configuration of installation is flexible, the size determined by the space at each venue as the project travels. The horizontal architectural support is created on site — a white painted wood platform.

exhibition history

Topologies (3-5.02), 2002
Installation, “2002 Biennial Exhibition,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 7 – May 26, 2002
Lace, thread, cloth, pins, painted wood support, 31 inches high x 74 inches wide x 18 feet long (overall dimension) Topologies (9-12.02), 2002

Installation, “Anne Wilson: Unfoldings,” Sandra and David Bakalar Gallery, MassArt, Boston, September 4 – December 7, 2002
Lace, thread, cloth, pins, painted wood support, 31 inches high x 74 inches wide x 36 feet long (overall dimension) Topologies (4-5.03), 2003

Installation, “Anne Wilson: Unfoldings,” University Art Gallery,San Diego State University, April 7 – May 7, 2003
Lace, thread, cloth, pins, painted wood support, 31 inches high x 74 inches wide x 36 feet long (overall dimension) Topologies (1-4.04), 2004

Installation, “Perspectives 140: Anne Wilson,” Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, January 16 – April 4, 2004
Lace, thread, cloth, pins, painted wood support, 31 inches high x 74 inches wide x 36 feet long (overall dimension) Topologies (11.07 – 2.08), 2007

Installation, “Out of the Ordinary,” Victoria & Albert Museum, London, November 13, 2007 – February 17, 2008
Lace, thread, cloth, pins, painted wood support, 31 inches high x 74 inches wide x 20 feet long (overall dimension)

A provocative phrase, that — “sloppy craft” sends craftspeople ballistic — and some collectors, too.

By dipping a paintbrush in the water pound, and mixing it with soil, you can create beautiful earthy shades, pretty much the same principle as watercolour.

By breaking grass and smudge it on paper you can make a shade of green, and by using a burned wood stick you can create some chalky black. Using only these natural pigmentations from nature you can create 100% organic art on recycled paper.

I have made two organic sketches, one that I prepared at home in my back garden and another one I used for a quick demonstration how it works for the kids.

Here are some of the results:

Age 9

Age9

Age9

Age 10

For more school art lessons check out my blog at Life of a Mother Artist
More to come…

Frame in process of being gilded

Does gold have a place in modern/contemporary art? Would you use gold if you knew how? Or is gold something of a symbol on being not-modern?

A particular caution that I remind myself of — looking at what people do to dress up their trailer houses requires a disciplined mind. My goal is to neither romanticize nor to satirize. I allow myself no irony about individual choices, although lots of irony can abound when examining communal structures (like bridges and mine tailings). What I want is to see what’s there without indulging in judgment.

So what is the predominate beautification element of Beatty Nevada ( 220 miles south of Reno, 110 miles north of Las Vegas, population 1200, where the Amargosa River surfaces, just for a minute, before being swallowed by the Amargosa desert [a subset of the Mojave desert])?

Well, mostly it consists of rocks.

The city stockpiles them in the multiplicity of vacant lots around town.

The post office shows them off.

The best soup and sandwich shop in town (as well as the only one) uses them as grass would be used elsewhere.

True there is at least one person in town who loves a variety of decorative elements (and perhaps indulges in a bit of irony of his own.)

But even the owner of the Beatty Club (above and below) on Main Street, formerly a place to buy food and drink and now a warehouse for “stuff,”  has some of his creations sitting on rocks.

The Bank of America (here the irony makes itself) makes use of the local home decor.

And someone with lots of energy and a strong back built a stone garage.

It makes sense, of course. Rock here is all around — millions of years of flash floods have pushed boulders out onto the desert floor, beautiful rocks, rosy, green, metallic, gold. Not much vegetation, too sparse for cows, but tons of magnificent rocks. And people here see and appreciate the qualities of rock, just as I have, in making a growing rock circle/maze from my days at the isolated Red Barn Residency.

The housing stock in Beatty is 90% trailers. One might think that’s because of the average income level, but in other small, economically poor towns, Basin, Montana, for example, there were far more conventional wooden and brick houses. The reasons for the ubiquitous trailer is obvious: no wood, except creosote bushes and mesquite and soft cottonwood, exists naturally for miles and miles. There’s no clay to make bricks. And building stone houses now requires rebar, experienced stone layers, and structural devices that drive up the price. Stone houses tend to be inflexible, small, dark, sometimes inconvenient for utilities. So trailers abound, ranging from converted school buses to double wides that have been stuccoed to look like traditional adobe dwellings. They have air conditioning, heating, carpeting, running water, all mod cons, and can be transported along Highway 95 quite easily. Almost certainly, if Jer and I were to live permanently in Beatty, we’d be in a double-wide with a heavy-duty chain link fence, perhaps disguised by creosote and greasewood bushes. We’d have a rock-laden yard, with a rock strip between the sidewalk and the street, and we’d hire someone with a stong back (or a big machine) to lay some gorgeous rocks along the walkways, just for sheer pleasure of seeing them every day.

So painters go to Tuscany to paint the villas or to Peru to paint the markets. In 2000 years people may come to Beatty to discover how the indigenous peoples lived. They will photograph the remains of the structures, and note the use of rock as an important, yet not very utilitarian, element.They will come to paint the remains of the civilization, imagining what it must have been like, back in 2010.

So, what observations have you made about the common use of decorative elements in your neighborhood. What do the natives do to their external surrounds to make them attractive or rational? What native materials do they make use of? What native materials do you make use of?

Robert Zakanitch, Red Watercolor, 34 x 36, 2007

Pattern and Decoration: An Ideal Vision in American Art, 1975 –1985 is the printed catalogue of an exhibit held at the Hudson River Museum in 2007 -2008. The catalogue has excellent essays by Anne Swartz, Arthur Danto, Temma Balducci, and John Perreault, as well as including short biographies of the artists and plates of the exhibited art. Most of the words which follow come from the catalogue.

The P&D catalogue gives a textual underpinning to formats and surfaces that we enjoy but have come to think of as “mere” decoration. Arthur Danto, for example, says that decoration fell somewhere between figuration and abstraction and “encompassed almost the entire visual culture of many non-Western traditions…. The impulse to decorate was the impulse to humanize.”

Miriam Schapiro, The Kimono, 1976, 60 x 50, acrylic and collage on canvas

According to Danto,  the P&D artists were already using decoration before the movement was created, and what naming it did was to “enable its members to recognize what they had in common.”

Joyce Kozloff, Tile Mural for Harvard Square Subway, 1985 -86

Danto is the eternal optimist, claiming that P&D is easily a third mode of art making, and that “formalism ought easily to apply across the boundaries to all three categories of art, had it not been weighted down with prejudices that had little to do with its essential practice….. It is not difficult to suppose that there are three modes of embodiment:” i.e. figuration, abstraction, and decoration.

The P&D movement is obscure, but the impulse, to make pattern, to decorate the environment with beauty,  seems universal, perhaps too common to be seen as on a par with the usual high-art suspects in western art history. Moreover, P&D often lacks irony, a form of expression that dominates almost all art these days. [I'm thinking of D. and the whole LA scene right now....]

Tony Robbin, Coll: the Artist, 2007–4, 56 x 70″

Critics of P&D had to come up with convoluted reasons for rejecting it, although some of the rejections (too pretty, too feminine, too serious) weren’t too hard to come by. But Donald Kuspit in a 1979 article “Betraying the Feminist Intention: the Case Against Feminist Decorative Art” in Arts Magazine felt that “art based on decoration betrayed the critical potential and intention of feminist art.” It apparently was too close to formalism in its theory and therefore, “too authoritarian.” But what is most fascinating is Kuspit’s later “confession:” He felt, he said, that he needed to “rationalize my enjoyment of Rober Kushner’s art  … compelled to apologize intellectually for the deep pleasure I take in it…”

Robert Kushner, Night Garden, Acrylic,Oil,glitter, gold and silver leaf, 60 x 60, 2000

Anne Swartz, the chief contributor to the essays in the catalogue as well as the curator of the exhibit, says “I suspect that until recently, a certain Puritanism surrounded the view of feminist art that prevented it from being seen as acceptable when it was sexually exciting and provocative. So when P&D art utilized some of the mechanisms of feminist art (provocation, pleasure, softness, etc) it challenged the intellectual systems that were supposed to be uppermost in the viewer’s mind, prompting a critic like Kuspit to repudiate the intentions of P&D as not supporting the utopian notion of feminist art as a sterile ideology.”

Swartz also speaks of the “bombastic approach of the new-expressionists…. It [P&D] wasn’t self-referential…and [had] an overall treatment of the surface.” Kim MacConnel said to Swartz, “P&D is nonhierarchical in the sense that it is not refining itself to an end point and time…. It is much more chaotic. It is open to different voices, it accepts different voices, it’s making different voices.”

Kim MacConnel,Tri-Rotating, Acrylic on canvas, 95 x 126, 1980

I’m fascinated by the theoretical underpinnings of this artistic movment,especially the constructs of “non-self-referential” and “non-hierarchical.” aAlthough I’ve moved far away from Pattern and Decoration in my own work, I still love it and so, perhaps, am looking for the verbal language which would allow me to speak more “authoritatively” about it.  But reading and looking at these materials also makes me think I could incorporate P&D into my own vision. One artist, Leslie Gabrielese, serves me as an example:

Leslie Gabrielse, Dancing on Top of the Mountain, 60 x 130, 2001, fabric and acrylic paint

I am a bit bemused at how enthralling I found the textual materials in this catalogue. There’s nothing like having one’s prejudices confirmed, I guess. Aside from the art and perception in this post, when you examine your work history, have you found at one time or another  some verbal explanation that seemed to capture something about a visual that you had but couldn’t explain? Something that enabled you to recognize what you had in common with other workers in the same modes?

The catalogue, by the way, is Pattern and Decoration, and is online as a Google book. The Google pdf version cannot be printed, but you can order a hard copy from the Hudson River Museum, Elizabeth A. Sol, Manager of Administration & Visitor Services, The Hudson River Museum, 511 Warburton Ave. Yonkers, NY 10701 Phone – (914) 963-4550, ext. 239 Fax – (914) 963-8558. The museum doesn’t seem to have a secure online server, so I ordered my copy by phone. A good slide show of the works (many of which couldn’t be included in the Google online version) can be seen in the NY Times .  Here is the accompanying Times review.

I apologize for the slightly formal tone of this blog entry — I’m still assimilating the language appropriate to P&D and so find myself less easy about explaining it. But here’s one last image that I found, all on my own, to continue the dialogue:

Yinka Shonibare, Here

]]> http://artandperception.com/2009/02/pattern-and-decoration-a-reprise.html/feed 11 http://artandperception.com/2009/01/texture-the-internet-and-other-conundrums.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=texture-the-internet-and-other-conundrums http://artandperception.com/2009/01/texture-the-internet-and-other-conundrums.html#comments Sat, 24 Jan 2009 03:17:28 +0000 June Underwood http://artandperception.com/?p=3226 I have just joined Facebook (thanks, D.) and of course, instantly found a group dedicated to a textile artist’s focus: namely, texture.

The photos of “texture” on the group site were close-ups, both of quilted fabric and of objects that showed as textured. I started through my photos and quickly realized that deciding on what shows texture is not as easy as might be imagined. Here are some possibilities from my files.

The High Note, JOU, Computer images on Silk, quilted, 12 x 12″, 2008.

The upper layer (of computer-printed sheer fabric) is turned back to show under layer. Normally the sheer would fall over the entire piece, showing through as it does on the right bottom. This dropping of the sheer obscures much of the texture while at the same time, contradictorily, adds to it.

Vilhelm Hammershoi, Sunbeam (and various other titles), 1900, oil on canvas.

I was thinking of writing this post on Hammershoi, so I had lots of photos of his work easily accessible. He’s Danish, died at age 52 in 1916, was in Paris while the Impressionists were impressing people (he wasn’t, impressed, I mean), and shocked his contemporaries by not making paintings with stories, content, mytholgies, or “meaning.” Of course, we’ve added all those to his paintings since then.

Photo, Main Street in January, Portland Oregon, 2009

More often than not, we see texture, even if we know the thing we are looking at is flat, like those tree tops that look soft.

Vilhelm Hammershoi,Gentoft Lake, 1905, oil

Hammershoi’s techniques included using paint thinly, in layers, ala Vermeer. His work is near-abstract, although the images are clearly identifiable. He has been highly touted because of the flatness of his images, although his late paintings of city buildings in London have been less than positively reviewed — mostly, I suspect, because they use perspective so classically. But in the Gentoft Lake image the water has great texture, as do the doors in Sunbeam.

Charley Bierly, Little Pine Creek in Snow, photo, about 2005

JOU Little Pine in Snow, oil on board, 2008.

So texture isn’t just a matter of medium (as seen in the quilted piece, The High Note) or a kind of technique (as in my version of Little Pine Creek). It, like most art, is a matter of illusion. Even though we know the tips of the trees would lash rather than soothe and the hills are solid and stony, they still look soft.

Photo of Vilhelm Hammershoi’s parents home in Copenhagen (portrait above piano is by Hammershoi, of his sister, who is most likely the pianist, also)

Vilhelm Hammershoi, Interior with Woman at Piano, Strandgade 30, 1901

Hammershoi gives us clear texture in the table cloth, the woman’s hair, even the butter (which has more goosh to it than can be seen in this internet version).

I’m still maundering about the question of texture in photos (and, necessarily, on the internet.) Shadows, hue changes, and recognition of objects seem to be the most immediate elements that cause us to “see” texture. More often than not, we see texture in almost all representational images, even if we know the real thing (the computer screen, the photograph, the painting) to be flat or relatively thus. Only in true abstraction is texture sometimes obliterated.

Clement Greenberg and the abstract expressionists knew that flatness was an essential of painted art. Greenberg said, ” The essence of Modernism lies… in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself… What had to be exhibited and made explicit was that which was unique and irreducible not only in art in general but also in in each particular art.” ( Modernist Painting, 1961 ) He also said, “It has been established by now, it would seem, that the irreducibility of pictorial art consists in but two constitutive conventions or norms: flatness and the delimitation of flatness (After Abstract Expressionism, 1962).

We have come a long way from the ab exes and C.G., but we also, because of media explosions, see more and more in 2-dimensional imagery in which we insert our own sense of texture.

So I still haven’t resolved in my own mind what I should be looking for when I’m thinking about photographs of art that contain “texture.” Anybody have a brilliant (or even a generally interesting) thought on the subject?

PS: For more about Vilhelm Hammershoi, see also the Ragged Cloth Cafe recent post.

The eureka moment came through the phrase used by one of the fine art critics: the phrase was “working the surface.” “Working the surface” in the traditional fine arts means adding, deleting, scraping, underpainting and overpainting, sanding, gouging — all the kinds of things one can do that either uncover and/or add to a planar surface. It seems clear to me that Jay’s process of working his boards and foamcore are fine examples of “working the surface.”

With quilted art, “working the surface” seems to show up in two ways. One is what is called “surface design,” which basically alters the flat plane, by dyeing it, laying rust on it, discharging (bleaching) it, monoprinting on it, and even digging into it, tearing and unraveling the threadwork. This work sometimes adds texture (especially with elements applied to the surface (applique) or taken away from it (“cutwork” or just plain gouging holes). These kinds of working of the plane are singular, patterned for the effect in a particular work, not meant to be turned into a commercial design for fabric (the original use of “surface design” had a strong commercial element.) The other part of working the surface with textiles is the work of embroidery and quilted lines that make for a frieze effect; when stitches are pushed through the two layers of fabric and the in-between batting or wadding, the stitched line makes an indentation, beside which the surface becomes raised by the pushed-aside materials.

I have never heard the phrase, “working the surface” applied to quilted art before, but when I heard that and then saw the intricacies of Jay’s working of his surfaces, I realized that the language may give me new insights into what can be done with quilted art.

At the critique, the guest “critics” (very kind observant folks) looked at two pieces I had brought, comparing them.

The first was one you’ve seen before: Mrs. Willard Waltzes with the Wisteria, 76 x 61″, 2003, hand dyed and painted cotton, embroiderie perse with computer-generated prints, and dyed overlays.

detail

This quilted piece has a strongly worked surface. The relief work of the quilted areas is combined with the hand-dyed mottled fabric and the graphically strong embroiderie perse of the appliqued/layered flowers to make a complex surface. My question for the critics was whether this was too complex an image, but they said it was very successful. What they also thought, though, was that the other piece that I showed, Mrs. Willard Dices with the Devil, lacked the very complexity of surface design that made the first successful.

Mrs. Willard Dices with the Devil, 64″ x 80″, hand-dyed and painted and quilted on cotton.

Mrs. Willard Dicing isn’t completely quilted. This incompleteness was not entirely because I didn’t have time (although that figures into the problem). The real reason that it’s incomplete is that I couldn’t figure out what I was doing with the background, except stitching it because that’s what stitchers do.

I found the foreground tombstone relatively easy to stitch:

The flat front of the stone needed a bit of surface texture against which to place the letters, and the top of the stone provides some sense of perspective, useful in this semi-flat composition.

Mrs. W. wasn’t too hard to quilt because she had to be the most solid element of the surface. Therefore I had to leave larger areas of her body unquilted to make the surface stand up between the stitches.

I even know how I will stitch Mr. Bones when I get a minute to do so — he’ll be heavily stitched in a shiny thread, silver or even clear polyester, which shimmers a bit when the light hits it. But the background –meaning the actual earth as well as the picture’s ground plane, stumped me.

However the concept of “working the surface” makes me realize that I need to add more variety in that ground; I needed to work the surface. I will probably do so in the form of added color as well as added stitching. And I might well do the stitching first and then pour on the color. Stitching before adding color means that the stiffening of the fabric won’t be such a pain when I am stitching it; and adding the color after the stitching could provide addition interest to the surface that a less complex set of values might lack. It was Jay’s gouging and then putting layers and layers of paint on his intaglio pieces that made me realize that I might be able to save the piece by doing this kind of work. With that idea, I think I can now bear to go back in and quilt more of the background, knowing that it will be further furbished with (I hope) subtle but interesting color. I also need to tone down the sky considerably, which I can do now that it’s stitched.

Which brings me to a last thought. One of the commentators on the piece said that I seem to have fallen between two modes of making art — the art which uses quilted surfaces and the art which uses painted surfaces. Actually he said it more bluntly: “June, you may have to make a choice between painting and quilting.”

This is the problem I’ve been wrestling with most of this year. Painting has a magical draw for me at the moment, but my contacts and communities are within the quilting arts. I hesitate to completely withdraw from the area that welcomed me and in which I am somewhat known. But I struggled so much with the quilting on Mrs. W. Dices that I was resigned to throwing aside the quilting art and completely immersing myself in painting. However, with the insights from various places that I’ve gained, I realize I was stuck not because I’ve been painting but because I simply didn’t know what I could do to save Mrs. Willard Dices with the Devil. Now I have an inkling of what might work.

So here’s a set of questions: do you work in a variety of media, and, if so, how do you justify the diffusion of focus that going back and forth between them can encourage? Have you made a difficult choice between media, abandoning one altogether? Is the brief essay above accurate in its views of the nature of “working the surface” as well as “surface design?” Are there other distinctions/comparisons between two different media that seem to illuminate as well as differentiate one another?

These are questions that I am mulling around as I am glaring at Mrs. W., still hanging on my design wall, waiting for me to move along. And I haven’t entirely abandoned the quilted art, although I find myself mightily reluctant to turn on the sewing machine.